Russia

With fears of government crackdowns looming from every corner of the globe, tech giants have to decide who they’re willing to piss off. Following a demand from Russia’s internet censor, Instagram has removed videos relating to bribery allegations made by the country’s most prominent activist. So far, YouTube hasn’t complied with the same request. Read More >>

On Monday, Wired published an inside look at Facebook’s struggles with fake news over the last two years. It should come as no surprise that Mark Zuckerberg still doesn’t think of Facebook as a media company, but an eye-opening story from 2007 reveals that in MySpace’s heyday, Rupert Murdoch managed to intimidate the CEO in a way that only an old-school media mogul could. Read More >>

Officials at the 2018 Pyeonchang Winter Olympics have occurred that a cyber attack hit the games, taking its website as well as TV and internet access at its main press centre offline, the Guardian reported. Read More >>

During the first Cold War, American and British spies would sometimes place coded messages in newspaper classified ads to communicate with each other. And depending on how you interpret a new report in the New York Times, the National Security Agency (NSA) has possibly updated the tactic, using its public Twitter account to send secret messages to at least one Russian spy. Read More >>

Russian authorities say they have arrested several engineers employed at the the All-Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics in Sarov, a top secret nuclear weapons facility, because they were involved in a cryptocurrency-mining scheme at work. Read More >>

The leader of the Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, was recently hit with US sanctions over human rights abuses such as his government’s torture and “purge” of gay men. But there’s one thing about the sanctions that seems to particularly bother Kadyrov: Losing his Instagram account. Read More >>

Twitter admitted on Friday evening that its investigation into suspected Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections had turned up what it believes were over 50,000 automated accounts linked to the Kremlin—and that it had identified 677,775 other accounts that “followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a tweet from these accounts during the election period.” Read More >>

There may be at least half a million pieces of man-made junk orbiting this planet. Tiny pieces can travel around 10 kilometres per second, far faster than a bullet. The International Space Station has had to adjust its orbit just to avoid the stuff. People are rightfully concerned about what to do with all this orbital litter. Read More >>

Venezuela and Russia both have economies that are heavily dependent on the price of oil. Both countries are dealing with economicsanctions imposed by the United States. And in the past few days, both countries began moving forward with an official state cryptocurrency. Neither offering sounds like it should be taken seriously. Read More >>

If you read that headline and got a sense of whatever deja vu is in Russian, don’t worry: they’ve been talking about this for years. I suppose the Russians may finally launch an orbital "hotel" soon, but to be honest, I’m pretty sceptical of most Russian ISS segment plans, which were once quite elaborate, but seem to never quite happen, year after year. Still, this plan offers a chance to actually make some money, so maybe it’ll actually happen. Read More >>

Terrifying Russian-appointed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov—known internationally for his country’s alleged concentration camps for gay men—had his Facebook and Instagram accounts taken down this weekend, and his buddies in the Kremlin are asking some questions. Read More >>

While Facebook and Google claim tat Russia-based accounts didn't do much, if any, meddling around Brexit, Twitter can't really say the same. Now another study has been looking at how Russian trolls behaved on the platform, and found they were up to their usual meddling tricks immediately after four UK terror attacks. Read More >>

About a month ago Facebook seemingly admitted that Russia tried to meddle with last year's Brexit vote, later promising to assist in any government investigations into the mater. Obviously it's doing its own internal investigation, which uncovered three ads paid for by someone in Russia. Read More >>